There Is No Kill Like Overkill/Comic Books

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Sin City:
    • The story "The Big Fat Kill" ends with just about every prostitute in town emptying guns into an alleyway to kill anyone who could possibly connect them to the death of a famous cop. It's one of the more... impressive images. Manute sums it up with his last words, delivered to the man who organized it: "McCarthy, you shit!"
    • Earlier in the story, Miho cuts off Jackie Boy's hand. And then plugs his gun so when he fires it, the slide goes into his own head. She is explicitly described as "toying" with him. And then, when Dwight instructs her to finish him already, Miho proceeds to "make a Pez dispenser out of him."
    • Miho actually does this a lot. She never kills someone when she can almost kill him and then destroy him. Family Matters has one particularly disturbing case where she repeatedly cuts a fat man until he's choking on his own blood, and then when McCarthy tells her to end it because they need to hurry up, she punts off his head.
    • Then there's John Hartigan finishing off Roark Jr. in That Yellow Bastard. As he puts it, he's eventually just pounding wet chunks of skull into the floorboards.
    • Marv pretty much embodies this trope. He basically made it his goal to kill every single person involved in the killing of his beloved Goldie, capped off with the twin slaughterings of the man who did the deed: he sawed one's arms and legs off, had a wolf partially eat him and for good measure sawed his head off.
  • In a possible Lampshade Hanging, HYDRA (from Nick Fury comics) calls its superweapon The Overkill Horn. Its function? Remotely activating every single nuclear weapon on the surface of the planet the whole world over.
  • Batman:
    • The Joker is sometimes known to do this; most notably with Jason Todd (the second Robin), in which, after smacking him across the face with a gunbutt (causing him to cough up blood), then kicking him in the face, having him roughed up by two muscle bound henchmen, and beating him brutally with a crowbar to the point where the Joker was literally covered in Jason's blood, he finally finished him by blowing him up with a bomb. It should also be noted that he came back from the bomb, too...
    • Another example is when after Alexander Luthor lost a finger and got stripped of his powers. Joker comes out of nowhere and sprays him in the face with his acid spitting flower, fries his head with two electric buzzers repeatedly, then finishes him off by a point blank range shotgun blast to the head.
    • Joker just seems to be DC's go-to guy for being absolutely thorough in making sure a character is Killed Off for Real. Plus he was REALLY pissed that he didn't get in on the whole Infinite Crisis schtick.
  • Lampshaded in The Invisibles:

Boy: Jesus, KM, how many times can you shoot two guys?

  • During the early years of the Cold War, atom bombs had a habit of showing up in fiction as the Finishing Move in situations where it'd seem like overkill, or even dangerously self-destructive, to use them. One example is the cover of the 1951 propaganda comic "Atomic War!", featuring two American bombers fighting a Soviet submarine, and the following quote from one of the pilots:

"His bomb missed! But even a near miss will get that red sub when I fire my atomic rockets!".

Punisher: Harry "Heck" Thornton. Hitman and all around Arkansas redneck. Heard a story about Harry that four state troopers managed to surround him once. He draws and kills three of them, the fourth one gets off a shot, Harry ducks it and shoots him dead. Dodged a bullet, so I use thirty.

  • Gold Digger:
    • Brianna Diggers LOVES this trope so much that she made smart bombs with their own AI in them to "go boom" on "baddies". To date, due to her love of this trope, she has scared demons which once terrorized the planet and her bombs, hundreds of them, were able to knock out a giant Dynasty War Gigas. Don't even get started on how over-equipped she comes for a camping trip in an area with lots of target practi... er, wild monsters.
    • Her sister Gina is also fond of this trope at times, if less so.
  • In the opening sequence of the first issue of Soft Desire, we meet a woman who is trying to steal a mysterious box. Because of this, a fight ensues with a guy who just won't die.
  • Alan Moore's Top 10: "Permission to use extreme force, sir?" "Kick her !@#$%ing ass, son."
  • War Machine's armor can add more weapons to his armor, his image is at the top for a reason.
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